The present invention relates generally to automatic milking of animals. More particularly the invention relates to an arrangement for fetching teat cups according to the preamble of claim 1 and a milking installation according to claim 13. Moreover, the invention relates to a method according to the preamble of claim 14, a computer program according to claim 24 and a computer readable medium according to claim 25.
The technical solutions for automatic milk extraction are becoming increasingly efficient and sophisticated. For example, today's milking robots allow a completely automatic milking procedure. In movable milking parlors, however, a human operator normally needs to be involved in at least some steps of the milking procedure. Of course, for enhanced efficiency it is desirable to minimize the involvement of a human operator. Therefore, it would be advantageous if one or more milking robots could be engaged in a milking-parlor installation to service the milking machines therein. Nevertheless, due to the multitude of moving parts, this is associated with particular problems.
The published international patent application WO2008/008036 describes a solution for automatically recognizing and determining the position of teat cups. The published international patent applications WO2005/122753 and WO2007/027137 disclose magnetic gripper devices and strategies specifically devised to manipulate teat cups by means of a milking robot arm.
Although the above-mentioned designs may be efficient as such there is room for improvement regarding rotary-parlor implementations. Namely here, the position of the teat cup magazine and the teat cups stored therein varies over time, and therefore it is a challenging task to control a milking robot arm to withdraw the teat cups from the teat cup magazine.